Religious revivals have an important place in American history. They have helped Americans deal with difficult social changes, as Billy Graham’s missions helped Americans (especially soldiers) overcome the emotional wounds of World War II and navigate the moral dangers of prosperity. Such movements influenced elites and, more importantly, millions of ordinary people, giving moral ballast to the whole nation.
The first of these revivals, the Great Awakening of the 1740s and ’50s, gave rise to American “civil society”—the moral sentiments and customs that unite Americans apart from the government, and that check government’s power. As Joseph Stuart recalls in Rethinking the Enlightenment, the Awakening “was the first common experience” shared by all the American colonists. It touched not just naturally fervent people, but deists like Benjamin Franklin, a friend of the Awakening’s leading preacher, the Anglican (and Englishman) George Whitefield. John Adams referred to this experience when he said the American Revolution “was effected before the War commenced . . . in the Minds and Hearts of the People”—as a “Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.” The Awakening created America’s “civil religion”—not religious symbolism that served politics, but a set of “common values transcending any one denomination” and the colonies’ political boundaries. The Awakening showed the colonists that they could reach God without the state, and that politics was legitimate only insofar as it served man’s “unalienable rights,” dictated by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” From this common religious sense arose a common national identity, independent of the British monarchy, that naturally called for a more suitable political framework.
Today, however, Americans’ religiosity is weaker than ever, and their civil society is coming apart. Those with no religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”) make up 29 percent of the population, and they aren’t exactly thriving. Fifty-five percent are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or never married; 63 percent have not finished college; and 36 percent make less than $50,000 a year. The sufferings of the nones may be no accident, as going to church has numerous proven benefits: churchgoers are less likely to die prematurely, commit suicide, suffer from depression, or die from drugs or alcohol. If American religion continues declining, America will become a sad place. It will be more susceptible to the sort of resentful, angry revolutions that destroyed eighteenth-century France and Weimar Germany (where religion had also been weak), and which on occasion we already see flaring up.
America needs a new Awakening for the good of suffering souls and the whole country. To imagine what a national religious revival might look like today, we should consider the winning strategies of George Whitefield and his more famous collaborator John Wesley, the leader of England’s Methodist revival.
John Wesley: Apostle of Modern England
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.Stuart’s description of England during John Wesley’s youth, in the early 1700s, reminds one of our own times, marked by secularization, economic change, and discontent among the working class. Religious fervor had had a bad reputation ever since the English Civil War and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, when religious extremists spread political chaos and violence in the name of God. After Cromwell’s death, people turned away from God to find fulfillment in “the increasingly dynamic secular world” of the early industrial revolution. Technological advancements were improving life for everyone, and making some very wealthy. But coal miners and factory workers suffered tremendously. These uneducated “squatters and wandering migrants” worked in dangerous conditions, for little pay, and with little religious formation to help them find meaning in their suffering. They became “untamed and ungovernable,” and liable to riot.
Whitefield began preaching to the coal workers of Bristol, England in 1739. Starving for the hope of the Gospel, people flocked to him, and Whitefield called on his friend John Wesley, another Anglican minister, to help. Wesley eventually became the most important preacher of what came to be called Methodism, the religious movement known for its “methodical” approach to Christian living. By the end of Wesley’s life in 1791, 70,000 people were “committed” members of the Methodist societies that he had started, and countless more were converted to the broader “evangelical” movement he inspired (whence today’s evangelicalism). William Wilberforce, one of those evangelicals, was then beginning the long, but eventually successful, effort to abolish slavery in the British Empire (in which Wesley gave him direct encouragement). Meanwhile, France was undergoing a revolution that soon ended in a bloodbath. In England, workers’ riots occurred from time to time, but they always ended peacefully, as preachers rushed to the violence as blood to a wound, healing souls with the Gospel.
How did these men preserve the English-speaking world from the disasters that plagued France and Europe for generations?
First they met suffering, unchurched people where they were, which was not in churches but in the dangerous neighborhoods of industrial towns, places filled with “drunkenness, cursing, and swearing—even from the mouths of small children,” Stuart says. Wesley said, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Over his lifetime he traveled 250,000 miles on horseback (ten times the earth’s circumference) to preach 40,000 sermons. He preached wherever was most convenient, often in open fields, a highly unconventional approach. If the location was properly situated (beside a church wall, or in the pit created by a collapsed mine) the acoustics could allow as many as 25,000 people to listen at a time.
Methodist preachers studied public speaking and theater, both to be heard at a distance and to find phrases that “pierced the heart,” as Stuart says. Their preaching elicited “unusual phenomena” among the crowds: “murmurs, groans, outcries, trembling, convulsions, and falling down”—“called being ‘slain in the spirit’ today.” The Anglican establishment disapproved of such enthusiasm, and John Wesley himself was wary of it. He was well educated (at Oxford) and a committed member of the Church of England, which grounded itself in Scripture, tradition, and reason. He knew that fervent emotions could be “dangerous” if not molded by the moral discipline and sound doctrine that filled his sermons. But Wesley also knew “it was . . . dangerous to regard [the emotions] too little”: Anglicanism’s turn away from religious fervor had alienated many of its faithful. Wesley saw it as his mission to evangelize both hearts and minds, raising his hearers to the spiritual plane by starting from their sub-rational emotions.
He also engaged people’s minds through print media. Commercial newspapers and pamphlets were the internet and social media of Wesley’s day. The free press came into being only around 1700, when England’s censorship laws ended. Christians like Wesley immediately jumped into the lively print culture that arose, communicating “in clear, forceful writing.” Wesley “wrote, edited, or abridged some four hundred works” during his lifetime. He exhorted people to read spiritual literature “leisurely, seriously, and with attention,” in Stuart’s words, and “to put it into practice.” Wesley’s efforts, along with those of numerous other Christian writers of the eighteenth century (such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson) rebutted English rationalists, so that no English Voltaire (eighteenth-century France’s brilliant critic of religion, whom Wesley called a “coxcomb”) ever dominated public discourse. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Ronald Knox continued this tradition of Christian public intellectuals in England into the twentieth century.
The Methodists also used hymns to connect minds and hearts. When Wesley first came to Newcastle, he stood on a street corner and sang until fifteen hundred people had gathered, and only then did he preach. Charles Wesley, John’s brother, composed more than six thousand sets of hymn lyrics, which were set to German melodies and compiled into hymnals. These songs summarized profound truths in simple and memorable poetry. Their emotionally stirring music implanted the words in people’s memories and increased their love of the truths they sang. Many of these hymns—such as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”—continue to inspire Christians in our time.
Of course, Stuart says, “[o]ne could preach, write, and sing to thousands, but if no structures were in place to support them afterward, all could be lost.” Wesley therefore set up “religious societies [that] nurtured the life of faith through mutual accountability, confession, and Christian fellowship.” These “voluntary associations” were not meant to replace churches, which were the guardians of Scripture and creeds. (It was only after Wesley’s death that Methodism became an independent denomination.) Stuart likens Wesley’s religious societies instead to “centralized religious orders such as the Jesuits” in the Catholic world: they overlay churches and supported them, providing supplemental formation in faith and morals. These societies tried to “avoid fomenting Christian division and sectarian thinking,” as John Wesley’s father Samuel characterized the ones he founded (which influenced John’s approach). Independent businesses cooperate through trade groups for the general benefit of commerce; through Wesley’s societies, different Christian groups cooperated for the general evangelization of the public.
Bringing Biblical Basics to the Unchurched
Many Christians have already employed Wesley’s methods for years, especially the evangelical communities that are descended from his movement. Many are already using the most dynamic media of our day—digital media—to spread the Gospel, often to great effect. Many are going to the roughest and poorest neighborhoods to bring to God those who seem farthest from him. But it is hard to think of any contemporary evangelizer that has attained media success on the scale that Wesley did (although some non-Christian influencers do quite well). It is also hard to think of anyone who has traveled as much as Wesley to meet people face-to-face, or who like him combines electrifying oratory with solid doctrine. And it is rare to find major Christian movements today that, as Wesley did, value both fervor and church life proper, without confusing them.
Much of the evangelical tradition emphasizes extended preaching and enthusiastic, musical praise-and-worship, which so efficiently evangelize the unchurched. But some might turn these into a substitute for more formal, liturgical worship. Lively singing can help many people feel that God is with them, doctrinal sermons can prepare their souls for contemplating God, and both can be good; but they alone are not sufficient for religion. God is a mystery that one cannot know only by emotion and reason. Liturgy is also needed to connect worshippers to God himself—in solemn, direct meditation on his revealed Word, and in sacramental actions he established, such as the Lord’s Supper.
Catholics and Orthodox, like the Anglicans who did not follow Wesley, have participated less in evangelical revival movements. Those groups emphasize orthodoxy and liturgy, but many of their members have not appreciated the benefits of reaching people first with general biblical instruction, regardless of whether they enter full communion with one’s denomination. Many also have forgotten the value of non-liturgical, enthusiastic revivals, like the ones Franciscan field-preachers led in medieval England, well before Methodists did. Some have tried to retrieve revivalism by importing praise-and-worship into the liturgy, but that often precludes the solemnity that liturgy requires.
A movement like Wesley’s today would preach basic biblical morality and faith to the unchurched, regardless of which specific church they finally joined. It would draw on the resources of all Christian denominations and, therefore, be more effective for its purpose than one denomination acting alone. But the movement would also encourage people to join some liturgical community, ideally the one with the fullness of truth (although each person ultimately will have to discern that for himself, with God’s help).
Such an effort would be eminently worthwhile. It would help those suffering from today’s cultural and economic upheavals, and it would strengthen civil society—as did the Awakenings of the past. It would recommit all Christian groups to the fundamental beliefs that they share. And it would unite them, across denominations, in a common, noble cause, hastening the coming of that day when they might again be perfectly one, as their Lord prayed they should be.
Image by EWY Media and licensed via Adobe Stock.